Conexion a Sci-fi novel – suggestion/comments welcome.

I haven’t entirely been idle as I have been on my travels to Sorrento and the North West of England which has kept my blog a little quiet lately. I have been writing a new Sci-fi book called Conexion.

I have just completed the second draft this very evening and am starting the third draft tomorrow.

I would be very grateful for any comments or suggestions.

Thank you!

Here is the opening section:

Chapter 1 – As it was

James Hendrix, better known as Jimi to everyone who knew him, noted the first indication at precisely 2.37 and 37 seconds on May 30th 2249.

It was a date that was to go down in history as one of the most auspicious, even though at the time he thought little of it.

Warnings went off routinely as every lump of rock or space junk that was heading anywhere near an inhabited planet was flagged up. Most were of little consequence and would simply burn up in the atmosphere but a few were big enough to cause concern. That’s why the agency was set up.

Jimi assigned the latest intruder a signature code – JHUMA91074 – then he left it to its automatic tracking and went back to playing Solum with the station’s computer.

JH were his initials, UMA stood for Ursa Major, the segment of space that the object was first recorded coming in from, and quite an unusual one as could be seen from the low number of recorded warnings, 91074 indicated the number of objects that had originated from that sector.

Once assigned the computer continued to plot the trajectory and that was normally where the whole matter ended. Most of the debris was considered of no risk and were merely monitored, never to be heard of again. People like Jimi performed the mundane task of acknowledging the warning just as a fail-safe. The Public did not like the idea of there not being a human touch somewhere along the line. They felt that humans should make the decisions even though it had been well proven that computers were far better at it.

There wasn’t a great deal of excitement to be had in Jimi’s work. Being an astrophysicist had sounded great when he’d opted for the training but wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Jimi worked for the AEWC – the Asteroid Early Warning Centre – in its favour it paid well and at least got one up into vacuum even if that’s as far as it went. For the most part it consisted of mainly spending long tedious hours on your own every night, pointlessly acknowledging things of no significance that the computer had already done, and vainly hoping for an event of significance to finally take place so that there was at least something to get excited over. The sad fact was that even if a major event did occur then all Jimi had to do was ensure that the computer had passed the information on to his superiors, which it routinely did anyway – so even that wasn’t exactly thrilling.

It was not a pleasant thing to realise that one was in effect redundant and surplus to requirements, so Jimi tried not to think about it too much, which was why he spent most of his time playing games with the computer. Even that enterprise was futile – about as pointless as checking space junk. He knew the computer could beat him hands down every time if it had not been programmed to limit its capabilities in order to give him a fighting chance. Still, it whiled the hours away.

Jimi had not paid too much attention to this particular intrusion other than to note that the object was far too far away at this point in time to be of any importance, so he did not have to register it into his consciousness or grant it a moment’s speculation as to what it might be. A minor niggle did reach the surface of his thoughts; if it was far away and yet had registered it had to be big. But hey, space was full of lumps of rock and the majority of them were of absolutely no significance. Space was big. As long as they did not cross routes or threaten planets they could be disregarded.

It goes to show, doesn’t it? There’s no limit to how wrong a person might be!

Sounds intriguing. Just the sort of sci-fi novel my other half loves to read. My only comment would be that some of the sentences are quite lengthy. It’s something I’m thingy about when writing 😦 They could all be easily cut into shorter ones. It makes for easier reading whilst keeping the integrity of the story better captured. If that makes sense….

The immediate fault being in character #1’s name – this immediately gives the reader an identity and credibility problem for all too obvious reasons, unless of course the reader is unawares. It’s never a great idea to re-use a very famous name and successfully transport it into another time and another culture. The residual never fades in the readers mind.

A potentially exciting story – reminds me of the control room scenes in Jurassic Park. The exposition slows it a little – would it be possible to focus more tightly on your character’s thoughts, perhaps? Otherwise an intriguing opening …

I like it! I would like to read more. I could give better feedback with more. Only thing that threw me for a loop was the characters name. Keep up the work. Ill look for more. I’m currently writing a Sci-fi myself. I post my chapters in my blog. If you get a chance. Check it out. Maybe we could bounce ideas.

Hi Brett – well the name was meant to throw you. I’m not sure if that works but I’ll look at it in a while with more objective eyes plus a bit of feedback.
I’ll put up a bit more over the next days and check out yours. I’ve just this minute returned from a trip. Unpacking and catching up.